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The push by the Justice Department to set quotas and deadlines on immigration judges comes as those courts face a backlog of 750,000 pending cases nationally, with an average wait of more than two years for a case to get a hearing.
In Arizona this year, there are 10,635 pending cases, and the average wait time was 619 days, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC data said that more than 8,000 of the Arizona cases were in Phoenix courts, with the rest split between Eloy, Tucson and Florence.
Against that backdrop, the Justice Department has set quotas that are scheduled to kick in on Oct. 1. Tabaddor said the department’s expectation that immigration judges should handle 700 cases a year is unrealistic, given the wide variance in cases on any one judge’s docket.
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